Explore Essays and memoir
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The Ambivalent
Paulo Scott
‘He not only sees the World Cup as a ceasefire, but also as a series of sleights of hand that hide what’s really going on, political debauchery, spin and chicanery.’
Key Stroke
Will Self
Striking the keys of the same typewriter that once sat under J.G. Ballard’s fingers, Will Self reimagines the legendary writer’s last days.
Mona Simpson | First Sentence
Mona Simpson
‘A year later, still in third person, I’d taken five days off my character’s long wait. I’d moved to present tense, though, for more immediacy.’
Arrival Gates
Rebecca Solnit
‘It was like trying to go back to before the earthquake, to before knowledge.’
The Defeated
Jonny Steinberg
‘Peter Mitchell died on a frontier, not so much between black and white, or between the landed and the landless, as between the past and the future.’
Frankenstein’s Mother
Darcey Steinke
‘If pain is what makes others real to us, there was not another human being more real to me than my mother.’
Tourist
Andrea Stuart
‘My curiosity about lesbianism was an accomplice of my feminism: a path that allowed me to be sexual and free.’
A Place on Earth: Scenes from a War
Anjan Sundaram
Dense forest and formless roads lead Anjan Sundaram to the sites of conflict in the Central African Republic in 2014.
Living Goddess
Isabella Tree
‘I longed to know what she was thinking, what she did all day when she wasn’t performing rituals.’
The Fighters
David Treuer
‘When he stepped into the cage he was doing battle with a disease. The disease was the feeling of powerlessness that takes hold of even the most powerful.’
L.A. Diary: Notes from a Mexikorean Country
Juan Pablo Villalobos
‘I was reassured to see that my hotel does not resemble the one in The Shining.’
Women’s Shadow in the American Western
Thirza Wakefield
‘The wild is no place for women—the film would seem to say.’
